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Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Review of The Routledge Concise Compendium of the World's Languages, Second Edition

SUMMARYThis is a curious, but entertaining book. It falls somewhere between a series ofWikipedia entries and a collection of reference grammars, although it’s closerto the former than the latter. It’s based on an even more curious book, thefirst edition, which was put together by George Campbell: ‘Campbell, who waslisted in the Guinness Book of World Records during the 1980s as one of theworld's greatest living linguists, could speak and write fluently in at least 44languages and had a working knowledge of about 20 others.’ (LA Times Obituary,Dec. 21, 2004). For Campbell, languages were a hobby--he loved them and pickedthem up at a drop of a hat, but he had virtually no linguistic training of thetraditional sort, so his descriptions make more prototypical linguists such asmyself a little uneasy. For example, in the description of English it says ‘Oneand a half thousand years after Hengist and Horsa, the local dialect theybrought with them from Denmark to Kent shows every sign of becoming theplanetary lingua franca in the twenty-first century’ (Campbell & King 2011: 176).

The second edition was revised after Campbell’s death by Gareth King, a moreprototypical linguist whose expertise is Welsh (he’s the author of King 2000 andKing 2003). Interestingly, King chose not to revise some of the more colorful ofCampbell’s comments, in order to retain the flavor of the original.

Of course, some families have lots of instances (Indo-European has 46) while,somewhat naturally, Eskimo-Aleut has only Inuit, and Khoi-San has only Nama.

The book is divided into a small introductory section, with a glossary oftechnical terms (from ablaut to velar), a list of IPA symbols by ‘feature’(vowels, then stops, fricatives etc., with only non-roman letters listed) andanother one by alphabetic similarity (with the same restriction) and a list ofabbreviations (from abl. to W/Arm.)

Then follows the major portion of the book, the 110 language sketches.Each language sketch is roughly five to seven pages, and has an Introductionwith some facts about geography, number of speakers and relative vitality andcomments on significant literary works (so for Catalan he lists Ramón Llull; forGeorgian the poet Šota Rustaveli, and for Nahuatl, The Annals of Cuauhtitlan).

For each language there follow sections on Phonology, with a list of phonemeswith some notes on the significant allophones, and Stress and/or Tones. A Scriptsection summarizes Roman conventions if that alphabet is used, and a descriptionof any non-Roman orthography, including samples if easily integrated into Romantext (the Japanese entry includes both in-text hiragana and kanji examples). Atthe end of each article is a sample written text. In the case of languageswithout a standard orthography (such as Berber) there is a romanized sample. Forlanguages with two or more orthographies (such as ‘Serbo-Croatian’ [sic] andInuit) there are two or more samples. Generally the text is from the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights (although there is, for example, a religious text inSanskrit, one of the few not-really-spoken languages in the book, Latin beingthe other).

Ordinarily in LINGUIST list reviews the reviewer provides a summary of eachchapter, but with 110 chapters this is not practical. Instead, I will discuss afew selected chapters, focusing on languages I know well, but mentioning alsothose about which (like many linguists) I know a little.

EnglishThe description of English is, unsurprisingly the longest in the book, 11 pages.It includes a two-page history, including a list of ‘periods’ in Englishliterature. The phonology example (described as ‘a typically standard system’)presents the vowels of Received Pronunciation (RP), but with some odd choices.It lists three high front vowels (i ɪ iː) without explanation other than tomention that [ɪ] is one of two short vowels (the other being schwa) that canoccur at the end of a word.

Somewhat surprisingly it also includes a brief slap at prescriptivistgrammarians in the section on prepositions, noting that the objection to endinga sentence with a preposition is ‘ill-founded and make[s] no sense’ (Campbell,et al. 2011: 185).

ItalianThe chapter on Italian, representative of a common Indo-European language, is,to the best of my knowledge, accurate, mentioning briefly the importance ofDante and, contemporarily, Fellini and Bertolucci. Although the description is,for the most part, synchronic, the author (like, I suspect, most otherlinguists) can’t resist the occasional explanatory historical comment: ‘Manyinstances of consonant gemination are the result of assimilation of consonantclusters + compensatory lengthening: ottimo ‘best’ (2011: 338), as well as the occasional comparative comment ‘Note that Italian hasgeneralized the Latin 1st and 2nd declension plurals (-ae and -i respectively)while Spanish instead has generalized the Latin accusative plurals in -s’(Campbell, et al. 2011: 339).

TurkishThe chapter on Turkish, on the other hand, contains several errors. It correctlymentions that /k g l/ have palatalized allophones in proximity with frontvowels, but incorrectly uses the IPA symbol for a dark l [ɫ], while what happensis (similar to English) that clear [l] occurs next to front vowels, and dark [ɫ] occurs next to back vowels. In addition, it states ‘voiceless stops andaffricates are voiced at junctures preceding a vowel: e.g. kitap ‘book’,accusative kitabi; ağaç ‘tree’, genitive ağacın’ (p. 731). This is not astandard view of Turkish phonology (although the issue is less clear than itused to be -- see Becker (2011). Underlying /b, d/ surface as devoicedword-finally and before consonants, and as [b d] elsewhere, while underlying /pt/ always surface as [p t]. The complexity occurs around ‘underlying’ /g/, whichsurfaces as [k] after consonants, as compensatory lengthening after consonantsbut generally as ‘nothing’ intervocalically -- either as a glide between vowelsof differing backness or simply as a hiatus between identical vowels, leading towhat are technically minimal triples:

The section on script fails to mention the grapheme , pronounced [dʒ],although /dʒ/is listed as a phoneme.

Finally, although the examples illustrating the negative verb inflection arecorrect, the description of the morphology is oversimplified.

HebrewHebrew is, in general quite accurately described. The chapter begins, as onewould expect, with a brief history (again with the personal enthusiasm that is ahallmark of this book: ‘Today it is spoken as a native language by over 4million people -- a spectacular testimony to the single-minded efforts ofBen-Yehuda a century ago, and an inspiration to advocates and planners fordeclining and endangered languages around the world.’ (Campbell, et al. 2011:282). There is also a brief list of contemporary authors and poets, but nomention of the thriving Israeli film industry (as contrasted with, for example,the Hindi and Chinese entries).

The phonological and grammatical sections are generally correct (although thereis no mention of the fact that minority dialects such as Yemeni and Iraqi retainpharyngeal pronunciations lost in the standard language.) There are a fewsimplifications. Under the tense section it states that Present is marked by_me-_, which is true only for some conjugations. Lastly, under the section onprepositions it does not mention that many of them are proclitic (or evenprefixal, depending on one’s theory of morphology), so _ledavid_ ‘to David’,versus _lifne david_ ‘in front of David’.

ChineseChinese is described correctly as one of a group of mutually unintelligiblelanguages that are ‘traditionally termed “dialects” of Chinese’. The chapterconfines itself to modern Chinese, also widely known as Mandarin.

There’s a brief listing of notable literary and movie works, from Dream of theRed Chamber through Bawang Bie Ji -- Farewell my Concubine. Phonology,orthography and syntax are all briefly described, with examples of compounds andother two-morpheme ‘words’ cited with both pinyin transcription and standardHanzi characters. In keeping with a focus on what might be described as ‘coolstuff a linguist might be interested in’, there is a small section onfour-character expressions, including those made famous during the CulturalRevolution (san xiang yi mie ‘three capitulations and one cut-off’) andtraditional proverbs (_wang yang bu lao_ ‘lose sheep, repair pen’ -- i.e. closethe barn door after the horse has left.)

The discussion on word order accepts the Thompson & Li (1989) view that Chineseis a topic-prominent language and consequently ‘It is therefore difficult tocharacterize Chinese as either an SVO, SOV, or indeed OSV language, since allthese orders are perfectly possible (Campbell, et al. 2011: 135).

AppendixAt the end of the book is a comparative grid of numbers from 1-10 for eachlanguage listed alphabetically, a similar grid for each language, classifiedgenetically (both handy for a quick set of data in an introductory Historicalclass), an appendix illustrating orthographies (‘scripts’), from Arabic toTibetan with IPA equivalents where appropriate and a stroke chart for Chinese,and finally a simplified classification of languages by family and majorsubfamily. For example:

EVALUATIONUltimately, how can we evaluate this book? It’s a handy desk-reference (althougha little heavy, and fat -- 2 1/4 inches thick). But do we need such a paperobject when we have the web? When we have Wikipedia? There are entries inWikipedia for every language in the book, and some of them are, of course, muchmore extensive than the six to ten pages in the Compendium. On the other hand,some of them are much less extensive. The information on Nama in Campbell andJones greatly exceeds the Wikipedia entry, for example, with far more detail ongrammar. If you need to know whether a language has gender, or marksdefiniteness, its uniform structure will lead you to the answer instantly. Onthe other hand, if ‘your’ language isn’t in there (so, for example, if you areinterested in Tigrinya rather than Amharic) you’ll be out of luck.

Alternatively, it could serve as a textbook for a course on ‘Languages of theWorld’. There are very few texts for such a course. In the old days one coulduse Meillet (1952 -- for those whose French is good) or (Fraenkel 1967 -- for avery low-level course) but they are both long out of print. I have recently usedComrie et al. (2003), and there is the older Lyovin (1997) and thejust-published (Pereltsvaig 2012). Each of these has something to recommend it(Comrie et al. has colored pictures and sidebars, making it suitable for alow-level general education course, and both Lyovin and Pereltsvaig have lots ofintroductory linguistic material to supplement the parade of language familiesand typological categorizations. But they don’t have the uniform descriptivematerial in the present book. Finally, the book is priced well above what theaverage undergraduate could afford (it lists currently at US $240 -- roughly€190), so I’m not convinced I could recommend it for that reason alone.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Geoff Nathan is a full Professor in the Linguistics Program at Wayne State
University, where he is located in the English Department. He received a
doctorate in Linguistics with a specialization in Syntax from the
University of Hawaii but he has spent most of the rest of his career as a
phonologist, teaching first at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and
then at Wayne State in Detroit. His primary interests are in Cognitive
Phonology (having been one of the earliest to publish on that topic), but
he has also published on phonetics and the history of linguistics and has
recently begun exploring the relationship between the cognition of language
and music. He has a textbook on phonology within the Cognitive Grammar
framework. He also has a second (simultaneous) career as Wayne State’s